Artists and writers examine the bombardment of information, misinformation, emotion, deception, and secrecy in online and offline life in the post-digital age. Every day we are bombarded by information, misinformation, emotion, deception, and secrecy in our online and offline lives. How does the never-ending flow of data affect our powers of perception and decision making? This richly illustrated and boldly designed collection of essays and artworks investigates visual culture in the post-digital age. The essays, by such leading cultural thinkers as Douglas Coupland and W. J. T. Mitchell, consider topics that range from the future of money to the role of art in a post-COVID-19 world; from mental health in the digital age to online grieving; and from the mediation of visual culture to the thickening of the digital sphere. Accompanying an ambitious exhibition conceived by the Sharjah Art Foundation and volume editor and curator Omar Kholeif, the book is a work of art and a labor of love, emulating the labyrinthine corridors of the exhibition itself. Created by a group of writers, artists, designers, photographers, and publishers, Art in the Age of Anxiety calls upon us to consider what our collective future will be and how humanity will adapt to it.

Presents a survey of recent works by nine artists from Kyoto and Tokyo. It includes a curatorial essay by Dompierre and contributing essays addressing questions of national, cultural and personal identity at a crucial point in Japan's history.

In his debut novel, rock legend Pete Townshend explores the anxiety of modern life and madness in a story that stretches across two generations of a London family, their lovers, collaborators, and friends. A former rock star disappears on the Cumberland moors. When his wife finds him, she discovers he has become a hermit and a painter of apocalyptic visions. An art dealer has drug-induced visions of demonic faces swirling in a bedstead and soon his wife disappears, nowhere to be found. A beautiful Irish girl who has stabbed her father to death is determined to seduce her best friend's husband. A young composer begins to experience aural hallucinations, expressions of the fear and anxiety of the people of London. He constructs a maze in his back garden. Driven by passion and musical ambition, events spiral out of control -- good drugs and bad drugs, loves lost and found, families broken apart and reunited. Conceived jointly as an opera, The Age of Anxiety deals with mythic and operatic themes. Hallucinations and soundscapes haunt this novel in an extended meditation on manic genius and the dark art of creativity.

Economic collapse, poverty, disease, natural disasters, the constant threat of community unrest and international terrorism--a quick look at any newspaper is enough to cause almost anyone to feel trapped and desperate. Yet the recent election also revealed a growing search for hope spreading through society. In the timely Hope in the Age of Anxiety, Anthony Scioli and Henry Biller illuminate the nature of hope and offer a multitude of techniques designed to improve the lives of individuals, and bring more light into the world. In this fascinating and humane book, Scioli and Biller reveal the ways in which human beings acquire and make use of hope. Hope in the Age of Anxiety is meant to be a definitive guide. The evolutionary, biological, and cultural roots of hope are covered along with the seven kinds of hope found in the world's religions. Just as vital, the book provides many personal tools for addressing the major challenges of the human condition: fear, loss, illness, and death. Some of the key areas illuminated in Hope in the Age of Anxiety: How do you build and sustain hope in trying times? How can hope help you to achieve your life goals? How can hope improve your relationships with others? How can hope aid your recovery from trauma or illness? How does hope relate to spirituality? Hope in the Age of Anxiety identifies the skills needed to cultivate hope, and offers suggestions for using these capacities to realize your life goals, support health and healing, strengthen relationships, enhance spirituality, and inoculate yourself against the despair that engulfs many individuals.

This book confronts the issues young people face growing up in the confusion and anxiety of today’s highly global society. Young people face their futures consumed with feelings of doubt, uncertainty and ambivalence. The Global Financial Crisis and the rise of the Islamic State means young people are transitioning into adulthood in a time that we call an age of anxiety. They may be the first generation to have fewer opportunities than their parents yet, despite this, they are learning to imagine other kinds of futures. These are futures where economic collapse provides opportunities for entrepreneurialism and innovation, where Islamic State does not need to pose a clear and present danger, and where political action provides hope for a better world. Dealing with the current political and economic climate and progressive campaigns such as Black Lives Matter, Howie and Campbell tackle some of the biggest threats to the future of society. An innovative and wide-reaching study, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of human geography, disaster studies, politics, and sociology.

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today is the first major thematic group exhibition in the United States to examine the radical impact of internet culture on visual art. Featuring 60 artists, collaborations, and collectives, the exhibition is comprised of over 70 works across a variety of mediums, including painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, web-based projects, and virtual reality. The exhibition is divided into five sections that explore themes such as emergent ideas of the body and notions of human enhancement; the internet as a site of both surveillance and resistance; the circulation and control of images and information; the possibilities for exploring identity and community afforded by virtual domains; and new economies of visibility accelerated by social media. Throughout, the work in the exhibition addresses the internet-age democratization of culture that comprises our current moment. The earliest work in the exhibition is from 1989, the year that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. This development, and others that followed in quick succession, modernized the internet, and in the process radically changed our way of life--from how we access and generate information, make friends and share experiences, to how we imagine our future bodies and how nations police national security. 1989 also marked a watershed moment across the globe, with significant shifts in politics, geographies, and economies. Events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and protests in Tiananmen Square signaled the beginning of our current globalized age, which cannot be imagined without the internet.

Can fine art survive in an age of mass media? If so, in what forms and to what purpose? And can radical art still play a critical role in today's divided world? These are the questions addressed in the Art in the Age of Mass Media, as John Walker examines the fascinating relationship between art and mass media, and the myriad interactions between h

Part treatise, part critique, part call to action, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice is a journey into the uncanny realities revealed to us in the great works of art of the past and present. Received opinion holds that art is culturally-determined and relative. We are told that whether a picture, a movement, a text, or sound qualifies as a "work of art" largely depends on social attitudes and convention. Drawing on examples ranging from Paleolithic cave paintings to modern pop music and building on the ideas of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Gilles Deleuze, Carl Jung, and others, J.F. Martel argues that art is an inborn human phenomenon that precedes the formation of culture and even society. Art is free of politics and ideology. Paradoxically, that is what makes it a force of liberation wherever it breaks through the trance of humdrum existence. Like the act of dreaming, artistic creation is fundamentally mysterious. It is a gift from beyond the field of the human, and it connects us with realities that, though normally unseen, are crucial components of a living world. While holding this to be true of authentic art, the author acknowledges the presence—overwhelming in our media-saturated age—of a false art that seeks not to liberate but to manipulate and control. Against this anti-artistic aesthetic force, which finds some of its most virulent manifestations in modern advertising, propaganda, and pornography, true art represents an effective line of defense. Martel argues that preserving artistic expression in the face of our contemporary hyper-aestheticism is essential to our own survival. Art is more than mere ornament or entertainment; it is a way, one leading to what is most profound in us. Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice places art alongside languages and the biosphere as a thing endangered by the onslaught of predatory capitalism, spectacle culture, and myopic technological progress. The book is essential reading for visual artists, musicians, writers, actors, dancers, filmmakers, and poets. It will also interest anyone who has ever been deeply moved by a work of art, and for all who seek a way out of the web of deception and vampiric diversion that the current world order has woven around us.

We are living in a stressful world, yet despite our familiarity with the notion, stress remains an elusive concept. In The Age of Stress, Mark Jackson explores the history of scientific studies of stress in the modern world. In particular, he reveals how the science that legitimates and fuels current anxieties about stress has been shaped by a wide range of socio-political and cultural, as well as biological, factors: stress, he argues, is both a condition and a metaphor. In order to understand the ubiquity and impact of stress in our own times, or to explain how stress has commandeered such a central place in the modern imagination, Jackson suggests that we need to comprehend not only the evolution of the medical science and technology that has gradually uncovered the biological pathways between stress and disease in recent decades, but also the shifting social, economic, and cultural contexts that have invested that scientific knowledge with meaning and authority. In particular, he argues, we need to acknowledge the manner in which enduring concerns about the effects of stress on mental and physical health are the product of broader historical preoccupations with the preservation of personal and political, as well as physiological, stability.

When the Edmonton Museum of Arts opened in 1924 it was only the second art gallery in Canada west of Toronto. Spaces and Places for Art tells the story of the financial and ideological struggles that community groups and artist societies in booming frontier cities and towns faced in establishing spaces for the cultivation of artistic taste. Mapping the development of art institutions in western Canada from the founding of the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1912 to the 1990s heyday of art museums in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, Anne Whitelaw provides a glimpse into the production, circulation, and consumption of art in Canada throughout the twentieth century. Initially dependent on paintings loaned from the National Gallery of Canada, art galleries across the western part of the country gradually built their own collections and exhibitions and formed organizations that made them less reliant on institutions and government agencies in Ottawa. Tracing the impact of major national arts initiatives such as the Massey Commission, the funding programs of the Canada Council, and the policies of the National Museums Corporation, Whitelaw sheds light on the complex relationships between western Canada and Ottawa surrounding art. Building on extensive archival research and in-depth analysis of government involvement, Spaces and Places for Art is an invaluable explanation of the roles of cultural institutions and cultural policy in the emergence of artistic practice in Canada.